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When Hope Hurts: A Queer Advent Reflection
“‘For a while’ is a phrase whose length can’t be measured.
At least by the person who’s waiting.” -Haruki Murakami
With the Advent season upon us, there is no shortage of reflections on the necessity and beauty of waiting. And for good reason, as many of them have much wisdom. However, in recent years, as I consider the theme of “waiting”, I have come to recognize that it is not always the best choice we can make.
Like many before me, entering midlife has taught be that our hopes and dreams don’t just “happen”. While it might seem obvious to say, so many of us live our lives imagining a future when things will somehow inevitably “be better”, where our worst fears and pain are behind us, leaving us free to live into the best life we’d hoped for.
The problem comes with out tendency- whether conscious or not- that this outcome will just happen, as though our hope itself can produce our desired outcome. And so we live our loves waiting for those outcomes. For a small few winners of some cosmic lottery, this might even happen. However, for the rest of us, we can end up spending the rest of our lives waiting. As Voltaire said so poignantly: “We never live; we are always in the expectation of living”.